01629648

Component

Concern about climate change has resulted in a multitude of policies at state and federal levels aiming to decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation. Some of these policies intend to reduce driving trips and distances, measured in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), through land use policy. Successful local implementation of these policies requires methods to estimate the VMT effects of local land use projects, which are often too small to register meaningful changes in regional travel models. Sketch-level VMT estimation tools have been developed to analyze individual projects but vary in their approach and suitability for the wide spectrum of development projects and project contexts. This study compares and evaluates a variety of VMT estimation methods across a sample of projects located in Davis, California. Two projects were selected for their diversity of project and contextual characteristics and were evaluated in six sketch-level VMT estimation tools. Several salient findings emerged regarding versatility and analytical strength of VMT estimation tools, as well as the practicality of use. Primarily, each tool has strengths and weaknesses in either the land uses it can analyze, the location of projects it can analyze, or both. Further, this analysis underscores the challenging question of how to illustrate good planning through the quantification of VMT.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40 Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting.

01618707

17-06879

English

12p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References; Tables

Land use planning; Methodology; Sketch planning; Traffic estimation; Travel demand; Vehicle miles of travel

Davis (California)

Highways; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-06879

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 12:49PM